Las Vegas

Las Vegas pre-production - Band blown away. The band arrive and Bono says, "There's nothing I don't like". They seemed overwhelmed by the scale and struggle to "board an already moving vehicle".

Pre-production, Vegas. And at last they came. The band arrived today, complete with a film crew to capture their reaction to seeing it for the first time. We fairly blew them away, too. "I'm freaked", says Bono, "there's nothing I don't like". Long may this reign. Adam was pretty chatty, but everyone else just seemed overwhelmed by the whole thing. Bruce said they looked like they were trying to board a moving vehicle, which pretty much summed it up. We showed them the screen, the Lichtenstein piece, the gorgeous Keith Haring animation which arrived yesterday - even the I-mag looks great, half dissolved with the Jennifer Steinkamp textured pieces. The close ups of people on stage are extraordinary, as the screen gives them a background of this electro-pixel mayhem. We have a long way to go, but the potential is massive.

Within the bands entourage (certainly by comparison to the crews clockwork scheduling) travel departure times are often a little loose. This morning was especially so, due to three contradictory memos which had been emailed out last night and this morning.

There was a 6.30pm conference call arranged between Bono (Dublin), The Edge (Los Angeles), Steve Matthews (London) and myself (also London) to blow the cobwebs off our brains and discuss the reincarnation of the Vertigo Tour.

I was planning on resurrecting the tour diary today, being the day we were scheduled to fly to Auckland for the load-in tomorrow. However, its now old news that the remainder of the tour dates have been postponed, so Im not going anywhere further than the corner cafe. Its been a very weird week indeed - much akin to driving into a wall.